Tante Rose, Mother's sister, passes away in California, and Mother tells her daughter Rose's life story. Because Mother was twelve years younger than Rose, she speaks about her in fragments, fragments into which the daughter incorporates her own imagination. Rose, who as a child lives in the Midwest with Mother, leaves home when Mother is young to move to Chicago. There she becomes a stenographer and establishes a routine of riding the El and reading a book she has taken from home at Sam's Lunch Counter. Rose meets her husband in Chicago, whom she marries after seven weeks of acquaintance. Mother is the flower girl at Rose's wedding. The daughter imagines meeting him, knowing him, being her present age while Rose and her husband are still young before the war. Only a day after Rose and the man are married, he enlists in the war but returns home a month later due to a minor infection. Rose and her husband have an arrangement in their marriage in which they do not see each other—the man goes out with his friends at night. One day Rose arrives home to find him sitting at the kitchen table to learn that the twenty-five year old man is dying.

After Rose's husband passes, Rose meets Pincus, an art historian twenty years her elder, on a boat. The two begin a type of courtship, and Mother and the narrator find various pictures of their elopement as they go through Rose's belongings. Mother travels to meet Pincus when she is still young, fifteen-years-old, and Pincus takes her to an art museum where he shows her a picture of a naked woman and tells Mother she will one day look like the woman in the portrait. Mother faints at this moment from the discomfort of a premature sexual awakening, and Mother does not speak to Rose or Pincus the rest of the trip.

Pincus soon reveals to Rose that he is dying, but the two continue their lives as normal, with Rose working on oil paintings. After Pincus dies, Rose does not take any more photographs. The young girl knows about the rest of the aunt's life prior to her aunt's death through annual visits to her aunt's apartment in the town over in Southern California. Mother tells her daughter she will be glad one day that she sent her to her aunt.